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Do these orbs require a hit roll? Because quite frankly, I find the image of the party wizard vanishing and leaving behind a bunch of unopposed monsters during the final BBEG battle hilarious. Or even better - a leader, striker or controller suddenly finding themselves plunged into a cage fight with no party and a whole bunch of critters.
Oh, okay - I know the orbs wont work like this, but it would provide some hilarious "oops" moments.
* what is killed in the orb stay in the orb, forever. Including its stuff. You can be sure PC won't abuse it, now
* what is killed in the orb stay in the orb, once more. Or rather, it will be there the next time you enter the orb. Alive an kicking. After a few uses, PCs will hesitate to use it...
* the orb stay "in real world". If someone destroy it, everything inside is freed and take 8d6 force damage
* those orbs comes in pair. When one is used, the resulting scene is visible in the other. And the spectator can affect the creatures in the other orb with his own spells of he wants (but the reverse is not true). No one said the other orb owner is your friend...
I'm sure there are many ways to make those things cooler and balanced...
* what is killed in the orb stay in the orb, once more. Or rather, it will be there the next time you enter the orb. Alive an kicking. After a few uses, PCs will hesitate to use it...
Why alive? How about rotting. The stench deals 1d10 ongoing damage (no save).
Oh there are plenty of ways to balance them in the end, but as presented now they are anything but balanced.
The terrain control isn't the issue, its the ability to strategically split encounters into smaller chunks that is the issue mostly, all for "free" relatively.
They're a very cool idea... but how about some way for targets to resist? Be it via attack roll, save, taking an action to exit, sustain costing something, _anything_
I do wonder what the reaction would be of PCs to monsters with this ability.
They're a very cool idea... but how about some way for targets to resist? Be it via attack roll, save, taking an action to exit, sustain costing something, _anything_
I do wonder what the reaction would be of PCs to monsters with this ability.
Yes, an escape route would be nice. Maybe the Orb in the hand of the Wizard beings to sparkle and everyone knows that its him. And if you attack the Orb Wielder (or the Orb), you can choose to break the effect.
Or maybe the effect requires Sustain: Standard instead of Sustain: Minor.
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It does need an attack roll - anything auto-hit sounds really really bad.
It should be sustain standard - its a sick, powerful effect.
It would be better as an expensive consumable - I'd get tired of this if every RPGA event after level 20 I could predict 1 or 2 encounters. And how does one even write for these types of things?
I would just prefer them to not be published, but whatever.
I do wonder what the reaction would be of PCs to monsters with this ability.
I'd guess a little bit of "huh?" followed by "beat its ass!" The GM usually determines the terrain anyway, so having it set because the monster can snap its fingers rather than because they tracked the monster to a room isn't that big of a paradigm shift for how 4e functions. Switching from "terrain is so important we're dedicating an entire DMG chapter to it" to "here's a tiny box that 4/5 of your encounters will happen in" is a much more jarring change.
Technically, there is a way for the monsters to escape ... beat up the wizard. The wizard isn't going to have many places to hide, he's in pretty close quarters. And, if you stun the wizard ... it IS going to end. If you daze the wizard, he has to use his minor to sustain that effect. If you knock the wizard unconcious, again, they have to get the wizard concious ASAP or they'll be booted out of the orb., Etc, etc, etc ... The wizard that brings everyone into the orb becomes target number one ... and it isn't exactly hard to get to him n a 5x5 "room".
The wizard taking a pounding (not to mention reducing his own ability to sustain other zone effects) might make the wizard think twice about using the orb constantly.
Technically, there is a way for the monsters to escape ... beat up the wizard. The wizard isn't going to have many places to hide, he's in pretty close quarters. And, if you stun the wizard ... it IS going to end. If you daze the wizard, he has to use his minor to sustain that effect. If you knock the wizard unconcious, again, they have to get the wizard concious ASAP or they'll be booted out of the orb., Etc, etc, etc ... The wizard that brings everyone into the orb becomes target number one ... and it isn't exactly hard to get to him n a 5x5 "room".
This is the drawback and, in my opinion, a pretty large balancing factor -- stuck in a 5x5 room is just about the last place I want my wizard to be. Especially when it's filled with terrain that limits my manuverability.
Re: Orbs. Am I the only one when reading about this thought of those Pokemon balls? Great, so not only has 4th edition put a little Magic: the Game into D&D (Power Cards), now they've added a little Pokemon too.
What sort of bonuses do the tattoos give for using healing surges? There are a lot of builds (*cough* dwarven battle-ragers *cough*) who could easily afford to burn 5-10 healing surges off the top at the start of a day...
(I've always sort of expected healing surges to go somewhat down the 3E turn undead route, where long term a lot of the use is to power abilities unrelated to their initial implementation)
Re: Orbs. Am I the only one when reading about this thought of those Pokemon balls? Great, so not only has 4th edition put a little Magic: the Game into D&D (Power Cards), now they've added a little Pokemon too.
Does Pokemon use the balls to pull themselves and some monsters into alterdimensions so they can more easily kill the monsters? If not, you're probably in a small minority.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WalterKovacs
(At the same time, I've seen a few cases where the fights end up in the "entrance" to an encounter, allowing all the cool terrain features to add up to nothing at all, so it doesn't need an orb to pull that off.)
Tangent:
I've seen this happen several times these last 6 months of gaming. The DM has clearly put lots of thought into cool terrain and monster synergies ...but has neglected to think through how the first round of the fight will inevitably bottle up the PCs in the entrance to the cool terrain.
...then most of the actual combat happens in the narrow, confining entrance, with precious little maneuvering/shifting/tactics/cool stuff.
It's a common DM pit-fall --> one I've fallen in myself several times: If you want the PCs to be involved in the super-nifty terrain you've set up let them get through the stinkin' door before you pounce on 'em!
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Last edited by Nail: Today....just a few minutes ago
Last edited by Nail; 12th December 2008 at 05:26 PM..
What sort of bonuses do the tattoos give for using healing surges? There are a lot of builds (*cough* dwarven battle-ragers *cough*) who could easily afford to burn 5-10 healing surges off the top at the start of a day...
Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by James McMurray
Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.
Holy-moly.
Are these Daily powers, or properties? (....lemme guess: this was already spelled out above an' I missed it.....)
__________________ - Nail
Last edited by Nail: Today....just a few minutes ago
Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.
So, out of curiosity, if a high-con, dwarven durability fighter burns 5 healing surges at the start of the day (still probably leaving him with the same/more healing surges left than a non-dwarven sword-fighter has to begin with), what happens to his Rain of Steel/Unyielding Avalanche damage with the +damage on dailies tattoo?
From the (very limited) info provided, in Epic, a con-focused dwarf can probably spot a non-dwarf/non-con focused fighter 10 healing surges, which could add up to +30 damage/round/enemy with the various auto-damage stances...
On the orb: No attack roll, auto hit on the area burst 2 within 2 (so you have to include yourself, and it's the same size as the area inside the orb.)
On the tatoos: They are all properties, although some have built in limits on how often they happen (first time you get bloodied in an encounter). For the healing surge based ones, the ones that go up per tier are related to "when you spend a healing surge", and they give you more HP or resistance based on tierxnumber used.
The extra damage based on number of surges used adds damage to daily powers, and the other adds damage to attacks that do damage on a miss. And neither of them scale with tier.
In fact, for the tatoos there are 4 "types" - Number of surges used, getting a critical hit scored against you, first bloodied, and when you spend an action point.
On the orb: No attack roll, auto hit on the area burst 2 within 2 (so you have to include yourself, and it's the same size as the area inside the orb.)
The orbs. Why? Just why? They aren't at the Memory Bottle (thought bottle?) level of bad idea, but still...
Quote:
On the tatoos: They are all properties, although some have built in limits on how often they happen (first time you get bloodied in an encounter). For the healing surge based ones, the ones that go up per tier are related to "when you spend a healing surge", and they give you more HP or resistance based on tierxnumber used.
The extra damage based on number of surges used adds damage to daily powers, and the other adds damage to attacks that do damage on a miss. And neither of them scale with tier.
In fact, for the tatoos there are 4 "types" - Number of surges used, getting a critical hit scored against you, first bloodied, and when you spend an action point.
So, are there any tattoos which would benefit from burning healing surges preemptively? Even adding just 5 damage to all dailies by preemptively burning 5 surges would be scary if that is how it works (and it almost gives Durability a purpose for everyone other than 8 con wizards).
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